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Score

Michael Dwyer

LITTLE HELP

Warner Music Australia and the Jimmy Little Foundation announced a new grant to support managers of indigenous artists at the Tamworth Country Music Festival last week. Warner has committed $15,000 per year over 10 years to be administered in partnership with the Association of Artist Managers, whose board includes Little's former manager and Foundation executive Graham ''Buzz'' Bidstrup. The Yorta Yorta star died last April after battling kidney failure. His musical legacy was reissued last week on the triple-disc Songman set.

VERDI GRATIS

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The premiere of La Traviata in Venice 150 years ago was famously described by its composer Giuseppe Verdi as ''a failure", though he sagely added that ''time will tell''. The incurable romantic is scoring a lot of love in 2013, the 200th anniversary of his birth, with opera companies in Florida, Istanbul and Shanghai already launching seasons of his most popular work. The free Opera in the Park event at Prahran's Victoria Gardens this Saturday night will edit La Traviata down to greatest hits, and feature Michelle Buscemi's homecoming performance after six years in Italy. English narration will fill in the gaps for those less travelled.

MSO ON ICE

A string quartet from the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra will perform a fanfare to the arrival of an ice polar bear in Federation Square on Monday from 11am. The sculpture by ice carver Paul Lowcock is a transparent plug for Frozen Planet in Concert at the Plenary on February 9, in which the MSO will play a live score to the BBC's widescreen natural history spectacular. ''We've heard he can carve in time with the music,'' says cellist Rohan de Korte, though the tempo will be determined by meteorological conditions.

BLONDE AMBITION

The ageless love affair between bronzed '70s Aussies and four spandex-packed Swedish pop stars will bloom again with a new doco, ABBA: Bang A Boomerang, on ABC1 on Thursday. For diehards, bigger news is that Agnetha Faltskog - the shy, blonde one - is preparing for a 2013 relaunch with pop writer-producer Jorgen Elofsson (Britney Spears, Guy Sebastian, Westlife) at the controls. The reclusive grandma's first album since a covers collection in 2004 will include a duet with Take That's Gary Barlow. Faltskog had her first, self-penned Swedish hit in 1968, aged 18.

KEEPING IT REEL

Dave Grohl will unveil his directorial film debut on 52 screens across North America and Australia this week. Sound City celebrates the defiantly non-digital and hence now defunct Los Angeles studio where Nirvana's Nevermind echoed after countless classics from Fleetwood Mac, Tom Petty, Neil Young, Guns N'Roses and others. Grohl's point - ''in the age of technology, where you can manipulate anything, how do you retain that human element?'' - is explored on an accompanying album recorded live to tape by Sound City veterans from Paul McCartney to Trent Reznor. The film screens on Thursday at the Jam Factory before hitting digital retail.